Larry Stearne makes a living off junk metal. Collecting it in
his truck and selling it to scrap yards is what pays the rent and
puts food on his table. He's no enemy of that business. But even he
knows when enough's enough.

Stearne lives about 150 feet from Action Metals, one of the 22
metal salvage yards scattered around southern Dallas, inside or
abutting poor, minority-dominated residential neighborhoods. From
Stearne's front porch, a big tractor with a grappling device is
visible on the other side of a fence, working over a heap of junk.
It lifts chunks of metal into the air, then drops the load down
with a crash to break it apart. That crashing noise is a constant
in Stearne's neighborhood.

A freight train passing by, horns blaring, combined with the
junkyard machinery and the pounding of tractor-trailer rigs on
South Lamar, force Stearne to shout so his voice can be heard.

"This doesn't belong here," he says of the scrap yard. "This
belongs in one of those industrial areas. ... You can't have
something like this where people live."

While Action Metals steadily grows its business, residents are
abandoning their homes. Erasmo Gonzalez says scavengers regularly
sit in his front yard or in the empty lot across the street to
strip the plastic off copper cable they've acquired through
suspicious means. Once stripped, the plastic is left in a pile on
his lawn, and the men head over to Action to sell the copper.

Neighboring properties are almost worthless. And when homes are
abandoned, scavengers move in and gut them. Next come the drug
users and homeless people. Dilapidation leads to teardowns. Houses
all around Stearne's and Gonzalez's homes have either been razed,
boarded up or sold for a pittance - including two lots sold to
Action Metals' owners.

That's exactly what's wrong with this picture. Existing zoning
regulations in Dallas do not permit companies like Action Metals to
open or operate within 500 feet of residential areas, but as a
grandfathered business, the standard zoning rules don't apply. All
over southern Dallas, industrial businesses have won concessions
that have allowed them to steadily encroach on residential areas in
ways that have been expressly forbidden in the north. It is a
discriminatory pattern that brings nothing but shame upon our
city.

Zoning is one of the most glaring, neglected areas in Dallas'
north-south gap. Until zoning rules are applied and enforced
equally, our city will not, cannot, become whole.

The Dallas Morning News' "Bridging Dallas' North-South Gap"
effort can point to poor code enforcement, stray dogs running in
packs or the lack of good supermarkets and retail in the southern
half of our city, but nothing will truly change until the south
reaches zoning parity with the north. Look at a zoning map of our
city, look at the zoning history behind it, and you'll gain a more
complete understanding of why the north-south gap exists.

All major cities have areas zoned for heavy, medium or light
industry. All have areas reserved for retail and commercial
activities. All have exclusive zones to accommodate apartments or
trailer homes, tiny bungalows or luxurious mansions. Northern
Dallas, like southern Dallas, has its share of all these zoning
types. But it's the mix that makes the difference.

In northern Dallas, a large, contiguous swath of exclusively
residential, retail and office space has existed for more than 60
years. That uninterrupted span has created opportunities for
sustained growth and steadily climbing property values that make
northern Dallas the envy of the country. People invest in
predictability.

When residential areas are broken up and interspersed with
junkyards, factories, chemical plants, meat-processing facilities
and the like - as has occurred for decades in southern Dallas -
residential property values predictably decline. People with
financial means take their money and run.

It's a proven formula for disaster. It's the formula that
created the north-south gap.

In the north, only from Love Field westward and northward does
industrial zoning have a significant presence. And even then,
there's a gradual transition from light, warehouse-style industrial
uses to the heavier stuff. There's a buffer, and only in a
miniscule percentage of neighborhoods is any residential area
exposed directly to heavy industrial zoning.

Northern Dallas has only three of the city's 25 registered metal
scrap yards, and none of those is anywhere close to a residential
neighborhood. All the rest are in southern Dallas. In southern
Dallas, heavy industry is everywhere - sometimes literally just
over the fence. That's the case for residents of the apartment
building at Ash and Meyers streets in South Dallas, whose next-door
neighbor is the Martin Sprocket and Gear foundry.

A no-man's land exists on several streets between South Lamar
and S.M. Wright freeway. Colonial Avenue is a neighborhood so
blighted and pillaged by scavengers and drug users, I get the same
feelings driving there that I got driving through Sadr City in
Baghdad during the worst days of the Iraq war. Not coincidentally,
a football field's distance away are some of the city's biggest
metal salvage yards.

Since 1960, Leamon Davis III has lived in a house across the
street from the property that is now Gold Metal Recyclers. "It
started out as a Fina gas station. Then it was a snow cone place,"
Davis recalled. The adjacent property was a drive-in movie theater.
But in the mid-1970s, brothers Neil and Ken Goldberg replaced the
snow cone shop with what Davis described as an innocuous-looking
booth and began collecting scrap metal for resale.

"It wasn't a problem for anybody because of the smallness of
it," Davis said. Growth was slow until the past two decades, when
residents came to see Gold Metal as "an instant job opportunity,
because anyone with a can could take it over there and sell it."
Then they turned to any other metal they could find, including
wires and pipes in unguarded houses.

Imagine the change for neighbors, especially as the construction
of S.M. Wright in the early 1960s isolated them from the rest of
South Dallas. All of a sudden, their quiet neighborhood was
sandwiched between heavy industry and a freeway. Property values
plummeted. Crime escalated.

At the time, all of southern Dallas was represented by exactly
two City Council members whose power was eclipsed by the majority
of council members from the wealthier and more powerful north.
Zoning decisions directly reflected southern Dallas' lack of
representation on the council.

Across the Trinity River in Cadillac Heights, those zoning
decisions would place more junkyards, meat-processing plants and
other open-air industrial facilities all within a one-block radius
of a residential neighborhood. Add to that two lead smelters and a
major sewage-treatment plant down the street, and their property
was doomed.

In West Dallas, more such irrational zoning decisions would
place homes right next to a lead smelter, more junkyards and
factories. Clementina Cortez, 50, has spent 22 years living a block
from a GAF composition shingle factory, a rusting-smokestack
industry that sends a constant smell of burning asphalt wafting
through the neighborhood and two nearby schools.

"Life isn't too good. The smell is bad," says resident Mary Van,
77. "There's nothing you can do about it. Just accept it, I
guess."

But why should anyone just accept it? I hear this argument all
the time from people who think that because it's been this way for
decades, things can't be changed. They must if we really want to
get serious about balancing out our city's development and
relieving the property-tax burden shouldered overwhelmingly by
northern residents. The reason why only 16 percent of Dallas'
property value is south of the Trinity and Interstate 30 is because
nobody wants to live or develop close to ugly, noisy, messy,
polluting industrial sites.

Staff members at City Hall have been aware of this problem for
years, and they've been pushing hard for the Forward Dallas
rezoning initiative that would create a more uniform and livable
space in the urban core of southern Dallas. Part of that initiative
is the rezoning that's occurring along the path of the new Trinity
River Corridor project. The goal is to phase out heavy-industrial
zoning next to the Trinity.

Obviously, there's significant resistance from industrial
owners, and leading the charge are Louis Okon, of Okon Metals, and
the Goldbergs. They embarked on major public relations campaigns
this year to reverse the negative image their businesses have
created.

Too late. Their negligence and abuse have inflicted irreparable
harm on property values. They have ruined people's lives. They
don't deserve a second chance to make things right. It's time for
them to move, instead of the residents.

It would seem that the City Council members whose residents have
suffered most from this poisonous industrial-residential cocktail
would be the ones to speak loudest in favor of moving industry
elsewhere. But council members Carolyn Davis of South Dallas and
Pauline Medrano, whose district includes Cadillac Heights, have
emerged as two of the scrap-metal industry's biggest
cheerleaders.

Medrano fought hard to save a metal scrap yard in Cadillac
Heights and help it expand even when presented with
incontrovertible evidence by the city attorney's office that the
owner was operating illegally. Medrano once told me she envisioned
celebrating Cadillac Heights industry by mixing it with bars and
restaurants that she labeled "funky" and cool. She didn't mention
the sewage station and carcass-rendering plants.

In October, she came to the defense of Okon and his metal
salvage yards. "We're always talking about Dallas going green. Mr.
Okon's business does that. We're saving our landfills because he
actually recycles there. You move them [the scrap yards] further
away - I hate to say it - someone's going to find a dark, dead-end
street" and dump their stuff.

Davis concurs, turning the focus to the South Lamar facilities
owned by Okon and the Goldbergs. "I think one of the things we have
to look at is a name change. This is a recycling, green initiative.
... It does help the environment," Davis said at an Oct. 13 City
Council meeting. "That's one of the things I've talked to [city
staff] about is us coming up with a brand, a name. Because one of
the things we think about when we think about metal companies [is
a] ... really bad vision or something within our city. But if it's
branded right, it can work."

OK, call it "parc à ferraille." By any other name, it's
still a junkyard.

As a metal collector, Stearne said it's nonsense to think that
people would dump their scrap metal on dark, dead-end streets if
Okon and the Goldbergs moved to dedicated industrial areas. "I
wouldn't mind the trip at all," he told me. "Just get them out of
our neighborhoods."

I've hung out at several southern Dallas scrap yards just to see
how "green" the business really is. You typically see big piles of
oily machine parts. Automotive fluid is on the pavement. Most metal
is uncovered, which makes me wonder what happens to runoff after a
heavy storm. At one site, I saw a man with a Geiger counter,
apparently checking a truckload of metal for radioactivity. Green
radioactivity, I guess.

Regardless of what Davis and Medrano say, I've yet to meet
anyone living near one of these sites who says it's good for the
community.

So where do they go? How about the International Inland Port of
Dallas for starters? This is a 234,000-acre preserve in southern
Dallas County that is crying for business. Thousands of acres are
in isolated areas where no residential development has occurred. It
is next to two interstate highways and two rail lines, which is
perfect for the scrap yards' export-oriented market. There are
other areas in northwest Dallas that already are exclusively
preserved for heavy and medium industry, with no residential
neighborhoods encroaching.

Mayor Tom Leppert said it best this summer when I asked him
whether it was outrageous to demand that those companies move.
"It's not outrageous. At some point, that's exactly what's going to
happen," he said. "With the Trinity investment ... you can't have
that sitting there." I've quoted those words in print before. And
I'll probably do it again, because these are words that he and
anyone else dedicated to bridging the north-south gap must never
forget.

Tod Robberson is a Dallas Morning News editorial writer. The
opinions in this column are his own. His e-mail address is
trobberson@dallas